Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation: Master the art of building modern desktop applications on Windows

561 Pages·2017·5.098 MB·English

by  Sheridan Yuen

Mastering Windows
Presentation Foundation

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Sheridan Yuen

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Mastering Windows Presentation
Foundation

Copyright © 2017 Packt Publishing

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First published: February 2017
Production reference: 1130217
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ISBN 978-1-78588-300-2
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Credits
Author Copy Editor

Sheridan Yuen Pranjali Chury
Reviewer Project Coordinator

Alex Golesh Vaidehi Sawant

Commissioning Editor Proofreader

Edward Gordon Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor Indexer

Chaitanya Nair Rekha Nair
Content Development Editor Graphics

Zeeyan Pinheiro Kirk D'Penha
Technical Editor Production Coordinator

Kunal Chaudhari Shantanu N. Zagade
About the Author
Sheridan Yuen is a Microsoft .NET MCTS and Oracle Java SCJP certified software
developer, living in London, England. His passion for coding made him stand out from the
crowd right from the start. From his second year onward at university, he was employed to
be a teaching assistant for the first year student coding workshops and has since returned as
a guest lecturer.
Among other prestigious positions, he was the primary software developer for the Ministry
of Sound group for four years, working on their main music business application,
responsible for creating their multi award winning albums. This application managed to
increase its users’ productivity by up to 80% in some cases.
In addition to this, he architected a unique ticket scanning application for their award
winning nightclub, making it the first club in the world to introduce scanned ticket entry
across all streams for their clients. Coming from a musical background and being a
qualified audio engineer, with experience of record production and digital audio, this post
was a perfect union.
He soon became a popular figure in the C# and WPF sections of the Stack Overflow,
“question and answer” website, being awarded enough reputation by the community
members to raise him to well within the top half percent of all users. While authoring this
book and other projects have kept him away for some time, he is keen to return to continue
to help new users to get to grips with WPF.

I would like to thank my long suffering girlfriend Jemma, who has regularly had to make
do without my company for the best part of a year, for her patience while I was composing
and writing this book and the many examples in it. I’d also like to thank Chaitanya from
Packt Publishing for convincing me to write this book in the first place and without who,
this book would not have been written.
Finally, I would like to thank Mary Thomson, Professor Sarah Barman and Professor
James Orwell in particular, from Kingston University, London, who inspired me to change
the direction of my previous career and planted the seed of curiosity that has taken me so
far. I would also like to thank James for encouraging me to move from the Bachelor’s
Degree course to the integrated Master’s Degree that I ended up gaining and for all of the
benefits that this brought with it.
About the Reviewer
Alex Golesh is an international expert in XAML-based technologies such as Universal
Windows Platform (Windows, Windows Phone, HoloLens, Xbox One), Xamarin.Forms,
WPF, and Silverlight. Also, Alex specializes in cloud-based solutions such as Microsoft
Azure. Alex developed training solutions for Microsoft Learning on Windows Phone and
Windows 8 and delivers workshops for developers and enterprises. Alex leads the
architecture and development process in multiple projects for his clients.
www.PacktPub.com
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Table of Contents
Preface
1
Chapter 1: A Smarter Way of Working with WPF
7
What is MVVM and how does it help? 8
Models 9
View Models 9
Views 10
Data binding 10
So how does MVVM help? 11
Is there a downside? 12
Debunking the myth about code behind 12
Learning how to communicate again 14
Introducing the ICommand interface 15
Handling events in Attached Properties 18
Making use of delegates 20
Structuring the application code base 24
Summary 34
Chapter 2: Debugging WPF Applications
35
Utilizing the Output window 35
Putting Presentation Trace Sources to work 38
Discovering inner exceptions 43
Debugging data bound values 47
Outputting values to UI controls 48
Catching changing Dependency Property values 48
Exploiting converters 49
Summary 51
Chapter 3: Writing Custom Application Frameworks
52
What is an application framework? 52
Encapsulating common functionality 53
In base classes 58
Through interfaces 62
With Extension methods 66
In UI controls 71
With converters 75
Constructing a custom application framework 82
Separating the Data Access Layer 99
Providing services 106
Implementing Dependency Injection 109
Connecting Views with View Models 118
Summary 126
Chapter 4: Becoming Proficient with Data Binding
127
Data binding basics 127
Binding path syntax 128
Escaping invalid characters 131
Exploring the Binding class 132
Directing data bound traffic 135
Binding to different sources 136
Binding with priority 140
Binding from within control templates 141
Binding source changes 142
Converting data bound values 143
Binding multiple sources to a single target property 149
Dependency Properties 153
Setting metadata 155
Declaring read-only Dependency Properties 159
Registering Attached Properties 160
Prioritizing value setting sources 162
Data templates 168
Taking complete control 172
Displaying hierarchical data 175
Data binding to enumeration collections 179
Summary 182
Chapter 5: Using the Right Controls for the Job
183
Investigating the built-in controls 183
Inheriting framework abilities 184
Laying it on the line 186
Containing controls 187
Canvas 188
DockPanel 191
Grid 193
StackPanel 199
UniformGrid 201
WrapPanel 204
Providing custom layout behavior 205
[ ii ]